4 Most-Rated VPNs for Your Laptop

What even is a VPN?

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, which is actually very simple. Virtual means it’s simulated, not real. An example of a real private network would be your home network, where devices can see each other and connect to the internet.

This means that if you connect to a VPN server somewhere else in the world, all the websites you navigate to and the information you download will appear as requests from the VPN server’s location, not yours.

In addition, the local coffee shop Wifi you are connected to simply see a single encrypted connection from you to the VPN server and will not be able to gain any knowledge about where you are browsing or what information you are sharing.

What about the law? Are they legal?

Depending on where you are, probably yes. VPNs are completely legal in almost all countries in the world. If you are from Europe, the Americas, Australia, Africa, or India, you are definitely fine, otherwise double check your countries laws.

One note on the law is that if you happen to use a VPN service within your own country, your country might have authority over it and therefore the ability to request your data. If you want to go all the way with security, it’s advisable to find a service somewhere abroad.

VPNs for video streaming services

One of the great uses of laptops is as a tv viewing device. VPNs are a great compliment to this service by allowing the user to represent themselves to a streaming service as located in a different country.

Many streaming services filter the content they provide by country because of complex licencing laws, but with a VPN you have access to the lot.

Changing country on most VPN services is as quick and easy as a click of a button so you can quickly switch between your favourite shows and movies in different countries.

If you are using a VPN, then the ISP simply cannot see what kind of content you are viewing, and therefore cannot lower the speeds it is providing you based on that information. In this way even if you were watching Netflix on an ISP which is capping the speed, yours will be completely unlocked.

What are browser plugin VPNs?

Although as we have discussed, there are many advantages to using a VPN service, there can be some downsides too.Streaming services with a VPN

They can cause your internet to be slowed down, and sometimes if you end up accessing a site from a different country, rather than opening options, it can limit them.

Because of these downsides, it’s often more effective to only use the VPN for your private data. One way of quickly choosing what goes through a VPN is to use a browser extension VPN.

This means you can have a browser window which is accessing your private emails or work, which is encrypted and protected, but outside of the browser, say if you were playing a video game online, it wouldn’t be slowed by the VPN Connection.

All four of the VPNs reviewed below have a browser plugin alternative.

Which Paid VPN Should I Use?

1. NordVPN

With over 4000 servers across 60 countries, NordVPN is an excellent choice. It can stream up to 101Mbit/s a second, meaning if your coffee shop were capable of streaming 4k content, NordVPN can too. It is a highly praised service.

It can be used to stream unlimited data across up to 6 different devices, and 24/7 live chat customer support in case anything goes wrong. It has a week trial to test it out and a 30-day money back guarantee.

NordVPN is not free and will set you back a small fee each month, however at the time of writing it is cheaper than ExpressVPN.

Available on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox and many others.

Which Free VPN Should I Use?

TunnelBear

With cute branding and no cost at all, it would be all too easy to overlook TunnelBear as not able to compete with the more serious looking products, but it’s a deceptively powerful tool.

It offers security as the others do, but this product has had an independent audit by a 3rd party company. It claims to be the only product to have done this.

The free version of TunnelBear comes with 500MB of data, which is a fair amount for talking on facebook and browsing traditional websites but might be strained if you want to stream videos. It is very simple to use.

Unfortunately for the unlimited data version, you will need to pay for the service at a similar price to the other two on this list, if not a bit cheaper. Also, it doesn’t quite have all the advanced features, but it is unlikely you would need them anyway.

TunnelBear also provides a blocker tool for chrome which will keep your personal data more safe and secure, especially when used with a VPN.

Windscribe

Another free option, Windscribe is still up there with the best. It is a relative newcomer but has similar strong features to the others. It has a large network of 100 cities across 52 countries, and a minimalist easy to use setup.

The free version comes with 10GB of data per month, which is a bit less than TunnelBear, but it’s measured by month instead of by day. This means that regular users would likely be better served by the larger data allowance of TunnelBear, however occasional but heavy users maybe find Windscribe suits their needs better.

An example might be that you only want to use it to watch a location restricted TV show once a week. On the highest video quality, an hour-long show is now often over 1GB in data, which would be fine even twice a week on Windscribe, but you couldn’t even watch one episode on TunnelBear because it would go over the daily limit.

Even on standard quality, a movie maybe be around 600MB which is too much for TunnelBear.

The premium version is similar in price to TunnelBear’s premium version.

How to get started

Keeping up with technology can be daunting, but often taking tiny easy precautions can make all the difference. Nowadays its best to use a VPN at all times, but at the very least, next time you are typing your bank details into a website and sipping on your Starbucks latte, remember where you are and who could be listening.

Then turn your new VPN on.

As we’ve discussed, VPNs can be very effective at getting you to the content you want or protecting your data, especially on the go. There is a myriad of options out there but the simplest would be to get a free one such as TunnelBear or Windscribe, depending on which one’s data plan best meets your needs.

If you get to a point where the free offerings are not cutting it, there are great options out there such as NordVPN where you can test the waters before you pay. If you do sign up to a plan, many of them have the money back guarantees and none of them is truly too costly for what they provide.

Keep yourself protected.

VPNs may sound intimidating with talk of networking, internet tunnelling, and encryption, but most of them used in their simplest way is as simple as installing the app and turning it on.